Longshot maybe, but any other McGill or other Canadian School grads?

[CharmedJ7]

Hi all,

I'm having an unexpected issue with applying to MSN programs in the states that I'm curious to hear thoughts/support/empathy on, particularly if there are others in a similar predicament. I'm American, from the Chicago area, and I am currently finishing up my undergraduate degree at McGill, which is in Montreal. McGill is an extremely well-ranked school, and I'd always heard it was very highly respected, and I honestly think any university, especially on the east coast, should be familiar with it. However, I cannot believe how much crap I'm getting about it being 'international'. Now, I realize that yes, it is techinically 'outside the US', but the grading system is identical (in that, we have A, A-, B, etc and it's on a 4.0) and Canadian schools are frequently evaluated with other north american schools in rankings.

My mom keeps telling me this is an administrative thing I just have to deal with, since probably all international schools are just lumped together, probably for the purpose of decoding truly foreign systems, like Australia, India, etc. But to me it is both ridiculous and insulting to be asked for a course-by-course evaluation (which runs about 150$) to "translate" my transcript into "US equivalents" - they're the same! I actually did do the evaluation for one school, and what do you know, as predicted I paid someone to essentially rewrite my transcript

I guess, besides just the money thing, it's also worrying because McGill is a notoriously hard school so if they don't know anything about it my GPA may look artificially low. Urg, sorry if this is rantish, anyone else in a similar boat? I really didn't expect to have these issues coming back to the US, makes us seem a bit snotty, no? Props to Yale though, who laughed when I asked if I needed to submit anything additional for my degree...